Inclusivity is at an all time high. The world has never been more diverse, more accommodating. And this change in society has seeped into corporates as well. Along with business models, advertisements and their portrayal has taken a huge turn. Audiences have actively started to oppose the narrow set of beauty standards prevalent in society, and this has started to affect the way brands release and publicize their products. An attempt is being made to include more identities within the ambit of a user base. More often than not though, we see a direct relationship between the popularity and size of the business and how tokenistic their measures are.
Admittedly there has been a rise in the amount of diversity that is seen all around. Brands have changed from putting out explicitly discriminative ads to those that (mostly) have better perceptions of all minorities involved. However, this paints a rather gloomy picture outside of the camera’s view. While more minority actors are getting far more positive screen time, they are still plagued by various beauty standards and stereotypes that they MUST adhere to. Obviously, these are much more stringent than those of majority actors in the genre that we talk about.
Most influencers depend on a sort of online persona for themselves, a character and life that is usually significantly different from their own. It may seem that these personas are chosen of a person’s free will, or what is best for the types of brands that they advertise. However, this freedom is almost unheard of.
Most brands opt for personas or images that are highly fetishised in society already, forcing most minority influencers to conform to these images. And of course, with a heavily fetishised online presence, comes a great deal of unwanted unavoidable attention.
This brings us to the concept of “cookie cutter diversity”.
Any piece of media is only truly diverse when, along with representation, comes a freedom of choice of character. And this is a freedom that has been denied to minorities throughout all frames of media.
The online presence of minorities is comparatively severely limited. This can look anything like the stereotypical “gay best friend” portrayals of non- cishet people, to imposing a “kawaii aesthetic” on Asian teen artists. To top it off, these are not in isolation of the beauty standards they bring along, meaning along with pretending to be a person they probably aren't, these influencers also have to invest a lot of time, money and effort into looking the part.
Why has this been able to proliferate for so long?
The answer is simple, we’re not as close to inclusivity as we’d like to be. Even in the most inclusive of communities, microaggressions are almost expected. And in the non existent ideal ones, where people aren’t biased against minorities, societal structures still very much are.
This means that brands get to say that they’re all for diversity and equity, while simultaneously denying their minority employees the right to expression. It is also something that audiences tend to readily lap up, mostly because they have little to no clue of what happens offscreen.
What do we then do to change it?
Societal change is often the hardest and slowest to implement, because it requires coordinated efforts from large groups of people. Not a lot can be done to disincentivize companies from the stereotype approach to diversity, as it can only result in hurting the people that portray them.
That being said, there are a small number of artists and influencers that try to explore their own image without being controlled by corporations. Supporting them can essentially show businesses that the idea of cookie cutter diversity is one from the past, and is bound to garner change in the near future.
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